Book Review: The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

I've been seeing - and attracted to seeing as we have the same first name - Kate Morton's books for a while but for some reason I've been resisting buying one.

I don't know what the reason is, maybe it's envy that her books are on every bookshelf and in every bookstore and mine aren't?

Maybe it's because I've been frantically busy and a little bit stressed so, as I always do when that happens, I stick to familiar writers and often re-read books rather than start a new one.

I like to think that it's the latter - envy never looks good on anyone.

What I will tell you is that The Forgotten Garden is definitely worth reading. The characters are terrific, the story fascinating. I have a couple of quibbles with it - and I expect these are both just me.

First, despite the headings that grounded us in a specific time period, I felt that an timeline and character chart (neither of which I usually read but I would have if there was one while reading this story)  at the front of the book would have been helpful. I kept having to stop and think about who was whose child, about where they were and how they all connected. That took a bit of the enjoyment out of the story for me.

 The second isn't really a quibble but I actually figured out the secret quite early on in the book though we don't learn it until much later. Did that spoil the book for me? No, but like my first quibble, it did take a bit of the enjoyment out of the book for me.

Despite these two quibbles, I really enjoyed the writing, enjoyed the story and its complications, loved the themes that ran so consistently through all three stories. Would I buy another one of her books? I already have and that's more important than all of my quibbles.

Kate